T-SQL Tuesday #50: Automation for LazyDBAs!

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different blogger each month.

T-SQL Tuesday 50 – Automation

This blog party was started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter). You can take part by posting your own participating post that fits the topic of the month. This month, SQLChow blessed us with a topic I am very passionate about. This months T-SQL Tuesday topic is automation.

I have a confession to share. I am a Lazy DBA. Those who know me won’t be shocked by reading this. Those who don’t know me. Trust me, I mean this in a good way. My lazyness over the years has actually motivated me to be a better DBA and data professional. I learned early on in my career that in order to be productive I must automate. No longer can we do manual daily checklists. We lose several hours that could have been spent on tasks that show our value not just hold the status quo. Automation allows us to end the cycle of repeating tasks and allows me to spend that time doing things that provide value, save the company money and make us happy.

Future State of Automation

I see more things being automated. More and more parts of the current “Production DBA” role as we know it today will be automated. This is going to open us up to doing amazing things. One day, an end to end performance tuning process will be automated. I look forward to seeing things that we thought were not possible be possible and automated. For example, automating server procurement and deployment once fell into this realm. Now, it’s already here. It’s known as “the cloud”. I will be honest, I was shocked to see how easy and quick it is to deploy an Windows Azure Server.

What are your thoughts about automation? Where do you see it going in the future?